Junk Shop Sci Fi DVD Hunts

Amazon et al has taken a little of the fun I get out of looking for sci fi movies.

Sci Fi movies are difficult to find on DVD. They may be shown on TV a lot, but even major films like "The Forbidden Planet" are a swine to find in the UK.

But that's what makes the finding of them so exciting when you do.

To me Amazon and the Internet is cheating, and judging by the difficulty in finding the said "Forbidden Planet" on Region 2, not that much use for some of these films.

Instead, I plough through markets, charity shops, junk shops, and pawn shops. Sure, Cash Converters may be full of what the downtrodden and addicted have discarded during society's downward spiral and is thus full of mainstream action and JCVD and Seagal, but heck I picked up the admittedly non-classic Species 2 there for 75p the other day. And Zardoz, way back when, nestling amidst "Wayne Rooney's Golden Goals" and "Carp Tips".

My profit in the misfortune of others.

Market stalls are great too. There's a couple of great ones that visit my home town...one where the DVDs are a bit more expensive and loosely sorted by genre - hello "War of the Worlds" 1953 style - and another one that is a hodge podge of plastic boxes stuffed with movies so tightly you can't actually look at them without trapping your fingers.

Another trader offers electric guitars and DVDs, got 2010 here wild admiring a really nice classic red Stratocaster. Another has horror DVDs a plenty, but I only buy classics, not "Boy Meets Girl Who Then Nails Her To A Spiky Chair" type material.

I still haven't found what I'm looking for

You can get all sorts of great stuff at Charity Shops, but I often find the obscure ones have the best stuff, and even then you have to be quick - "Quatermass 2" disappeared from "Save the Children" in the time it took me to go 5 minutes to an ATM. Oxfam have great stuff sometimes, but folk know to hunt there, among the classic vinyl and Skorpions albums with horrific covers. Lesser known charities in out of the way places can often be the best.

Junk shops are great too. Most don't really have movies, but you can be lucky if someone has got fed up and emptied their house of media on a whim. I love these places anyway, the owner often ignorant of the wonder he has, the dust, the oddities, collections of random ephemera.

But, none of them ever has Forbidden Planet

Copyright BloodyMulberry 09/07/14

Quatermass on the Potty

I now have Quatermass and the Pit.

Having just missed what I think what was the original TV version in the Save the Children charity shop, I found a 5 movies for 6 quid Hammer compilation with this classic movie on it, and snapped it up.

This is the 60s cinematic version, featuring Andrew Kier as Quatermass, and a young but not looking it Julian "The Shield Will be Down in Moments Lord Vader" Glover as the cliche sceptical military bloke.

T and A hunters will be sorely disappointed after seing this rather misleading poster

The plot, the same as the TV original, involves maintenance work at a London Underground station unearthing skeletons what turn out to be previously unknown species of hominid from several million years ago. Further rummaging by a gang of archaeologists reveal a long buried space capsule.

At about this time rocket scientist Bernard Quatermass turns up on the scene, and fails to stop the military taking over the investigation of what they end up believing to be a Nazi propaganda weapon.

All the while, increasingly powerful paranormal phenomenon are taking place in the vicinity of the eponymous "Pit", and Quatermass discovers that over the centuries, many terrifying phenomena have been seen in that part of London - Spring Heeled Jack type glowing apparitions. When the previously empty capsule suddenly reveals a sort of mini-hive of dead alien locusts...

The three legged martian locust is unearthed

...Quatermass somehow determines (with no evidence at all) that these creatures are Martians, who were involved in experimenting on primitive primates to alter early man.

Things now get rather bizarre, as he works out that the psychic happenings are caused by a sort of mental cinematic projection into people's brains. Rigging up a Heath-Robinson brain viewer to an early video recorder and monitor, and attaching it to his damsel-in-distress assistant's head and sticking her in the capsule, reveals the truth.

The Martians had been enganged in some sort of genocidal race war, and the extreme violence of these events has caused a great evil to be couped up in the Pit - and now it has been released!!!

It is these scenes of Martian warfare that stick in the memory. Utilising small Martian models in a sandpit, unintentionally amusing scenes of puppet carnage follow, as the creatures are stuck to pieces of card and pulled along through the sand, manhandled like a child playing with a star wars figure, wafted about on strings, and thrown into holes by unseen FX merchants.

It reminded me of something, but what? The old educational children's show "Watch" used the figures pulled along on cardboard strips to animate their tales of the nativity, but that wasn't it. And then it occurred to me what it was.

Michael Bentine's Potty Time!

This was anarchic children's TV show from the 1970s that I only just remember, a sort of puppet "Horrible Histories" of its day, involving the former Goon presiding over occasionally rather racially dubious portrayals of historical events.

Anarchic, and much filled with explosions and destruction, this will be only remembered now by those hitting 40. THere's not much to see on Youtube either. But Quatermass and the Pit reminded me instantly of it.

The 70s might have been a grim decade, but there was some great Television around.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 08.11.13